The Rev. Carl Saxton- The Abundance of God

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Please be seated.

In the Hebrew Bible, probably the largest of the genres to be found in its pages, is the prophets.

You know most of them, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah, goes on and on.

There's tons of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible.

And prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, despite what many of us think it's supposed to be, is not about telling the future.

It's about a person given the job of bringing a message from God to God's people.

And most of the time, it looks very similar.

One of the prophets, and will say, the word of the Lord came to name the prophet.

And the Lord said, Go to my people and say.

Spoiler alert, it's almost always the same thing.

Stop being a bunch of jerks.

Turn back to God, or bad things are going to happen to you.

That's the normal pattern.

Prophet is touched by the word of God, given a message, goes to the people of God, either directly to the people standing on a street corner, sometimes to the ruling class, the aristocracy, sometimes to the priests in the temple.

But it's always a message from God to God's people.

And usually it's spoken.

But not always.

Sometimes the prophets don't speak the message from God at all.

In fact, instead of saying the words, they act out God's message to his people.

One of my favorites is the prophet Hosea.

And one of his most prophetic acts, Hosea goes and he marries a prostitute named Gomer.

And they have two children, who they name no longer beloved and not my people.

Now, prostitution in the Hebrew Bible is almost always code for worshiping other gods.

So Hosea acts out this message from God.

If you continue to worship false gods, you will no longer be beloved, and you will no longer be my people.

That will be the fruit of your union with false gods.

Warning.

And Hosea never spoke a word in all of his acted-out prophecy.

In the gospel reading today, we have a miracle story.

It's one you all know well.

It's called the feeding of the 5,000, right?

Even people who don't go to church regularly have heard of the feeding of the 5,000.

In fact, it's such a popular miracle story that it's the only one found in all four Gospels.

And in a couple of Gospels, the evangelist tells it twice.

Now, it's a miracle.

Jesus fed five thousand men plus women and children, according to the gospel, with just five loaves and two fish.

But why?

I ask you.

After weeks and weeks of parables, now we get this miracle story out of nowhere.

Well, I submit to you that Jesus performing this miracle is actually acting out a parable that we are supposed to learn from.

We're supposed to learn something about God, something about us, something about our relationship with and to God from this acted-out parable.

Because I don't think Jesus does things on a whim.

I don't think he performs miracles to entertain the crowd.

And I don't think that he was just worried about them being hungry, because there's some details in this story that belie that.

Now, you've probably heard this miracle story interpreted in a multitude of ways.

Someone said to me this week, oh yeah, I know that one.

That's where bring whatever little bit you have to God and he'll make something of it.

Yep, that's there.

I preached on it at least twice, focusing on the sentence, you give them something to eat.

But I think there's more to be learned here.

How many of you have ever felt or thought or known somebody who felt or thought or said, Yes, I believe God exists.

I believe there is a God.

I believe that God is forgiving and loving.

But I don't think that God can forgive or love me.

I've done too many bad things.

I've felt too many bad things.

I've said too many bad things.

I've done stuff that God couldn't possibly forgive me for.

Or worse yet, look at me.

How could God love me?

See, in the story of the feeding of the 5,000, the disciples begin from a mindset of scarcity.

They go to Jesus and they say, Look, boss, there's all these people.

It's in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere.

Make them go away.

Send them off to find food and shelter elsewhere, because we can't possibly take care of them.

And Jesus says, they don't have to go anywhere.

You give them something to eat.

And what do the disciples say?

We've got nothing.

Look.

Nope.

I got nothing.

And they say, Well, but we've got these five loaves and these two fish.

But that's not enough.

Jesus takes the five loaves and the two fish, and he lifts his eyes up to the sky and he blesses them.

He breaks the loaves and he gives it to his disciples and says, Pass it out.

And so they do.

They go out into the crowd and they pass out bread and fish to everyone, which is miraculous enough.

But it says at the end of the miracle story that they all get a cocktail napkin with a cube of bread and a bit of fish with a toothpick stuck in it.

Were they standing there with their toothpicks going, well, that was nice, but um what comes next?

No.

It says that they took that bread and that fish and they went out to that crowd, and everybody ate and was filled.

Everybody was sitting back going, whoo! Like after a Thanksgiving dinner.

Miraculous enough.

A couple of fish and five loaves fed 5,000 plus people.

Not only did it feed them, but they were all stuffed to the gilds.

But you know where the biggest part of the miracle is?

What comes next?

There were leftovers.

The broken up bread and the broken up fish left some over.

And the disciples went out and they collected what was left over.

And how much was there?

Twelve baskets full.

Not a Tupperware container, not a doggy bag, not a ziploc.

Yellow and blue magnet.

Twelve baskets of leftovers from five loaves and two fish.

So yeah, everybody ate.

That's wonderful.

But what it shows us that God is overflowingly full.

God is a God of abundance, not just of fish and bread, but God is overflowing with love and forgiveness and grace and compassion and attention.

We all feel small.

I mean, if we are paying attention when we think about God, we should feel pretty small.

And that can be overwhelming.

But no matter how small we might feel, God is looking at each and every one of us with loving, caring eyes.

There is no universe in which God does not have enough forgiveness for you.

There is no universe in which God does not have enough love for you.

There is no universe in which God does not have enough attention to be paying attention to what's going on with you.

God is not a God who doesn't have stuff.

He's not a God of scarcity.

God is a God of abutness.

The psalmist says in our psalm from today, show me your marvelous loving kindness.

That's who the God we worship is.

Overflowing with love.

Overflowing with compassion.

Overflowing with grace.

Now I do want to point something out here.

If we look at the structure of the miracle story, Jesus did not multiply five loaves and two fish and walk down the road, passing it out to everybody who walked by.

This was a group of people who had come to Jesus looking for something.

And if you see the instructions, Jesus had his disciples go and have them sit down.

Right?

All of this love and compassion, all of this overabundance is there, but it requires some action from us.

It requires our engagement, it requires our desire, it requires our want.

It asks for our love in return.

It doesn't, however, ask for perfection.

It doesn't ask for perfectness.

It doesn't ask for us to be completely without blemish.

It doesn't ask for us to be mindless.

This abundance of God has been from the beginning and will be until the end.

Unto the ages of ages, as the Greek says, which means it can never run out.

It can never stop.

It can never complete.

And one day, one day, we'll be able to see that face to face.

So let go of that feeling that God can't possibly forgive you, can't possibly love you, can't possibly see you, can't possibly know you.

Let go of the idea that God doesn't have enough for you.

Or worse, that God doesn't have enough for those people.

Whoever those people are in your mind.

Even the absolute worsts you can imagine, God has enough love and forgiveness for.

And that is the whole reason why we're here.

It's the reason why we believe.

And it's the reason that one day we too, with the psalmist, will stand in front of God and say, Show us your marvelous loving kindness.

Amen.